Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Wa
The German Genius
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I talk to a lot of British people and one answer that comes up repeatedly is that every country needs to go through an identity-building process.
There is some evidence that the German government is right to be concerned. A survey in July 2004 found that whereas 97 percent of Germans have a basic knowledge of the English language, and 25 percent are fluent, only 22 percent of British students have any knowledge of the German language and just 1 percent are fluent. Whereas 52 percent of young Germans had been to Britain, only 37 percent of young Britons had been to Germany.
In an American survey in 1947–48, nearly a quarter of all Viennese thought that the Jews had “got what they deserved” under Nazism, while 40 percent thought that the “Jewish character” was responsible for anti-Semitism.
Forty percent of the personnel and most of the commandants of the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were Austrian, as were 80 percent of Eichmann’s staff—and Eichmann himself.
Tencere dibin kara seninki benden kara.
It was a division that first revealed itself in the 1980s in a phenomenon known as the Historikerstreit, the “historians’ dispute,” an acrimonious debate that was carried on among distinguished historians, such as Helmut Diwald, Ernst Nolte (a student of Heidegger), and Andreas Hillgruber, who had each produced solid, “regular” histories before. When it broke open, it comprised the following arguments:
• It was argued that Fascism was not a totalitarian system in the mold of Stalinism, but a response to it;
• Auschwitz was not a unique event but a copy of the Gulag; other, earlier, genocides had taken place in the twentieth century;
• More Aryans than Jews were killed in the death camps;
• Poles and Romanians were just as anti-Semitic as Germans;
• The worst excesses of the war—the invasion of Russia and the extermination of the Jews—came about because one man, Hitler, intended them to happen.
Novick again: “As part of this process, there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called ‘the Holocaust’—an event in its own right, not simply a subdivision of general Nazi barbarism.” It was now that the word “Holocaust” entered the language as a description of all manner of horrors.
In 1986, in opinion poll figures, 26 percent of people had seen Germany as Britain’s best friend in Europe, but by 1992 that had fallen to 12 percent. When Britons were asked, in 1977, if “Nazism or something like that” could again become powerful in Germany, 23 percent said yes, 61 percent said no. By 1992 the pattern had reversed, with 53 percent voting yes and 31 percent no.
The general impression is that Germans are all Nazis who steal sun loungers. This is all a cartoon-style view. The problem is that if you ask them seriously they have no view of Germany at all.
FPÖ propaganda at times verged on Holocaust denial, claiming it was in any case no different from the Soviet Gulag, while the party’s attitude to immigrants resurrected the terms of biological racism so redolent of the Nazis.
Although France was one of the more liberal nations in the interwar years, opening its doors to Jewish refugees from Poland, Romania, and Germany, since the war it has fought its own set of demons relating to that difficult time.
Some 75,000 Jews were deported from France during the war, the great majority seized by French police. Only 3,000 survived.
Opinion polls in Germany showed that while 80 percent of Americans were proud to be Americans, and 50 percent of Britons were proud of being British, only 20 percent of Germans were proud of being German.